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AP-7 autopista in Alicante to be free for the next 3 months
Effective immediately, and until mid-October, drivers will be able to use this stretch of road without paying
Tolls will be scrapped on part of Spain’s AP-7 motorway, a road which runs from Alicante, down along the coast of Murcia and into Andalucía, until October 15, 2024 to try and encourage more people to use it instead of the A-7 dual carriageway.
This was announced this Monday July 15 by Spain’s Minister of Transport and Sustainable Mobility, Óscar Puente at a press conference in Alicante to discuss issues regarding mobility and infrastructures in the area.
The inland A-7 road has sections with more than 95,000 vehicles per day, while the AP-7 toll motorway has around 5,000 vehicles per day, meaning that there is “a free autovía with a very high number of passengers and a toll autopista with a very low volume of passengers that produces very little revenue,” according to the Minister.
The toll section of the AP-7 Circunvalación de Alicante produces revenue “of between 2 and 3 million euros a year”.
Faced with this situation, two options were being considered: an improvement project on the A-7 to build a third lane, which “would cost no less than 350 million euros and would take several years, at least a decade”; or removing the toll on this section to encourage more A-7 drivers to use the AP-7.
The second option has, naturally, won out and the next three months – from July 15 until October 15 – will be a trial period for the section of the AP-7 toll road between Monforte del Cid and El Campello to be free of charge.
During this period, traffic authorities will be analysing the uptake of the AP-7 road to see whether it is worth making the measure permanent.
The Murcia and Andalucía sections of the AP-7 will not be included in this free pilot scheme, and nor will the section between Los Montesinos and Villamartín-La Zenia.
Minister Puente said that he expected traffic on the Circunvalación de Alicante section of the AP-7 to increase by “around 25,000 vehicles a day, those that form part of the long-distance traffic that uses the A-7 because it is free”.
At the same time, he underscored that this decision does not necessarily mean that the third lane of the A-7 will not be built in the end, but he insisted that it is “a job that is going to take years and is not the short-term solution that the province of Alicante and its traffic needs”.
Even so, there will be improvement works coming up for the A-7 to “increase its capacity”, such as the construction of the third lane at the most congested part of the road – between the junctions of the A77 and the A3, in a section of 4 kilometres – which will cost 50 million euros.
